Wait, I missed the part where increasing nitrate with dosing lowers phosphates. Can some one explain that?
This may only be slightly more than hypothetical....PO4 is used in building cell walls and such. Without nitrogen, the process can't work though.
Thing is, Nitrates are used like oxygen - for breathing. So NO3 is consumed at the rate of breathing. PO4 will have a very low rate of consumption tied to the lifecycle of the denitrifying bacterial.
EDIT....
I thought you were talking about carbon dosing for some reason....folks often mistakenly use carbon dosing to reduce PO4.
Nitrogen starvation will potentially hinder any biological process in the tank. Most organisms cycle nitrogen in a system, so the impacts of nitrogen depletion are usually pretty hard for us to discern.
So, if a bacterial population (or coral population, etc) were significantly nitrogen-limited, but all other factors were optimal.....dosing nitrates could produce a flush of cell growth that would consume PO4 at a faster rate than normal.
It should be a scenario of diminishing returns as far as fixing dissolved PO4 levels – because the rate of PO4 input to the tank is usually the problem...not the rate of consumption.
Make sense?
My understsnding is that without nitrate the phosphate does not get consumed by bacteria.
Nitrogen and phosphorus are both required for building new cells, so I'm sure that's true to at least an extent.
But, nitrate is far and away mostly "breathed" like oxygen by your denitrator population vs being used as food for building cell structure. PO4 is also only used for similar "slow" uses.
But it's also true, in the opposite case, that dissolved nitrogen uptake is diminished or halted in the absence of PO4. (Going from memory....hope this is the right link.....good read though, even if I'm wrong.
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Im curious to know why people opt for this stump remover stuff that will cause the chemical reaction in your test kits and lead you all to believe you are raising your nitrates instead of raising your nitrates by feeding your coral food. I am honestly mythed
Not sure what you mean by this quote - have you tried this?
I've been dosing potassium nitrate (spectracide stump remover) for a few weeks and my nitrate test numbers still haven't budged from zero –
what's your theory about where the nitrates are going?
I've also been dosing some liquid amino acids. There's no test I can do for them, but again, there's nothing breaking down enough to read as excess nitrates in the water column.
My theory is that I'm gradually "filling up" my tank's nitrogen cycle. Among any other uses in the tank,
nitrates seem to be coral's second favorite dissolved nitrogen source, after ammonium and before dissolved amino acids. They can also use urea, but it's the least used out of all of them.
I'm curious about your theory!
(BTW, my three little barnacle blennies aren't going to contribute much more than they are under any circumstance, and no more fish are going into this system...not in the foreseeable future, anyway.)
